REVIEW: Life Is Strange: Forget Me Not #3

In The Shadow Of The Video Game

Life Is Strange was a video game that launched in 2015 that followed the Telltale formula of storytelling that allowed minor inputs from the player to change the course of the game’s narrative. It was about teenage photographer Max Caulfield returning to Arcadia Bay, reconnecting with old friends, and exploring her strange new power to rewind time in a limited window of opportunity. As far as those types of narrative games go, it was a pretty compelling experience with unique and well-realised characters, so I can understand the appeal of wanting to expand on that world with a comic book series. Life Is Strange: Forget Me Not #3 opens with a blurb letting the reader know the series of events in these comics are far removed from the winding narrative of the main video game for which it’s named; in fact, the events of the game straight up never happened in whatever timeline this comic falls in. I think this is a lost opportunity because comics expanding and flushing out the existing events of the original game add weight to content like this that being set a whole timeline apart just can’t carry.

Kinda Cringe

Issue three opens with a two-piece lesbian band taking their music on the road cross-country while a little girl uses her powers on people’s memories (the more interesting narrative beat.) However, greater focus is given to the struggling musician plot. The girls meet up with a type of brand manager who is shown as fake and overly happy in a vapid and offputting way. Her office is so steeped in corporate crap that even the child they are travelling with senses something is off. This sets us up to empathise with the band when the company wants to cut them out of their own music and replace them with a bland, blonde, big-breasted AI singer they just feed their lyrics to.

However, this backfires when our leads have the most cringe-worthy reactions to the agency’s awful pitch, leaving me uninterested in either party. One of the band members just flips off the woman at least ten years their senior, screaming, “Hashtag Deez nuts!” and while later, she addresses her own statement as cringe the book, pointing out the own flaw in her rebel moment dosen’t make it any easier to swallow.

Zoe Thorogood’s script isn’t really firing off here as it should be, but Claudia Leoonardi’s art carries this issue. It’s sleek and bright and conveys the emotions on the page, effectively giving some life to this basic story. The awkward dialogue aside, the thing that seems to be holding this story back is ironically the thing that usually gives the Life Is Strange titles their punch: the superpowers. Because the little girl’s powers deal with memory and her goal is tied up with somebody who had their memories affected, the eventual reunion with her father is uninspired and unfulfilling as he dosen’t remember her and has since moved in with a new family culminating with the little girl having a less awkward but still cringe ‘rebellious’ outburst.

“Life Is Strange Is a memorable series, but Forget Me Not needs to tell you to remember it because of its stale story.”

FINAL SCORE
2/5 STARS

PUBLISHER: Titan Comics
WRITER: Zoe Thorogood
ART: Claudia Leoonard
COLORS: Andrea Izzo